Latest piece dominated by multiple giant silhouettes
If you haven’t noticed it yet, that big and colourful mural by the Multicultural Council building on Janette Avenue is no piece of stray street art.
It’s the latest permanent mural of Jill Thompson’s Art Attack Windsor project — meant to renew and beautify the city.
Local artists Colin MacDonald and David Creed were commissioned for the mural, which measures more than 1,100 square feet.
“It’s designed to show the fabric of all the different people who make up our community,” said MacDonald, a graphic designer and electronic musician who also goes by the creative pseudonym Thrack Anderson.
The piece is dominated by multiple giant silhouettes of people’s heads and shoulders. MacDonald filled his silhouettes with interlocking geometric shapes, while Creed filled his with arrow-like logos — stylizations of the word “creed.”
Elsewhere on the mural are the phrases “Welcome to Windsor” and “They are you, you are them.”
“It’s kind of a subliminal thing,” MacDonald said.
Creed said doing the mural had special sentimental significance for him: Although the mural is most visible from the Multicultural Council parking lot, the wall is actually part of the old Herald Press building on University Avenue West, which his parents used to own.
“It’s a building I grew up in,” Creed said. “We sold the business when my father passed away about 15 or 16 years ago.
“The ‘creed’ is kind of funny, because it was owned by Creed. But, also, what does multiculturalism have to do with? Your creed, your religion.”
The mural was completed over the course of four days in November. MacDonald and Creed are promoting it now in hopes of lining up similar projects for the spring and summer. Although they’ve worked on murals before, this is the largest piece either of them has accomplished from scratch, and they’re both eager to be commissioned for more.
Previous Art Attack Windsor murals have included Briana Athena Benore’s highly visible work on Ouellette Avenue and in Walkerville.
“I think Art Attack Windsor is great — their vision, and their working with the community .... It’s great to see people finding inspiration,” MacDonald said.
“We’re taking ugly old walls and making them pretty,” Creed added. “What’s nice about Windsor is people are accepting of these things happening.”
We’re taking ugly old walls and making them pretty.